Facilities

Radiochemistry Facilities: Approximately 1100 sq ft of radiochemistry lab space is available at the Colorado School of Mines. The space includes a wet chemistry facilities and a counting room outfitted and licensed for alpha, beta and gamma radioisotopes for work with milligram amounts of Np or Pu and tracer level concentrations for heavier, shorter-lived transuranic isotopes. Work with tracer levels of lanthanides such as ^152/154Eu as well as lighter radionuclides (e.g. ³H, ¹⁴C, etc.) is also available. This lab space contains a suite of radiological hoods and a full array of radioactivity counting equipment, including liquid scintillation, Cobra NaI Autogamma counter, intrinsic germanium gamma spectroscopy and silicon surface barrier spectroscopy. Further analytical capabilities include a Cary UV-Vis spectrophotometer, an Olis RSM-1000 rapid scanning spectrophotometer capable of stopped-flow kinetics studies, Metrohm and Mettler potentiometric titrators, and a Metrohm Autolab potentiostat and electrochemical cells for manipulating and controlling the oxidation states of actinides. In addition to the radiochemistry laboratory space on the Mines campus, approximately 800 sq ft of lab space at Building 15 in the Denver Federal Center is available to the PI’s. The lab space in Building 15 has comparable capabilities to that established on campus, but is under a broad scope radioactive materials license that allows work with any reactor produced isotope (Z = 1-83), including post-irradiation separations. A lab-scale 4-stage mixer-settler unit housed in the CSM labs at Building 15 provides unique capabilities for testing counter-current solvent extraction separations.

Denver Federal Center, Building 15: Building 15 in the Denver Federal Center houses a 1 MW TRIGA reactor readily available to Mines researchers for radioisotope production, neutron activation analysis, and other experiments such as neutron radiography and fission track analysis through a technical assistance agreement with the US Geologic Survey. More than 3000 sq ft of lab space in Building 15 is designated for work with radioactive materials, including characterization with X-ray tomography, SEM, TEM, and optical microscopy.

Colorado School of Mines, Chemistry Department, Coolbaugh Hall Labs: Courtesy of a variety of grants and donations Coolbaugh Hall maintains research level user capabilities for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy (JEOL 500MHz liquid state NMR and Bruker 400MHz solid state NMR), fourier-transform infrared spectrophotometry, light scattering, differential scanning calorimetry, flame AA, liquid/gas chromatography, fluorescence spectroscopy, thermal gravimetric or differential thermal analysis, mass spectrometry with a variety of ionization sources and magnetic separations methods and dynamic light scattering capability. Mines also has impressive material characterization capabilities including various electron microscopies (SEM, TEM, atom probe tomography), X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and thermogravimetric analyses instrumentation available to users.

Metals Analysis Laboratory: A laboratory for ICP-MS and ICP-OES metals analysis is maintained in Coolbaugh Hall.